Tuesday, September 20, 2016

Genetic Engineering needs Severe Government Regulation

This is going to be yet another profound social and ethical question of the 21st century, given the extraordinary developments in gene sequencing, genetic engineering, stem cell research, and IVF as described here:

The implications of the reproductive technologies described here are stunning, and profoundly disturbing.

The worshipers of free markets and libertarians should never get their way to fully privatise such technologies, because modifying the human genome could have potentially catastrophic effects.

Having said that, I am not a Luddite. If such technology is safe, it seems reasonable to use it to help people suffering from genetic disorders or genetic predispositions to diseases (and to physical or mental handicaps) to have healthy children free from those diseases, for not allowing a very carefully regulated service subject to intense government scrutiny seems cruel.

There is another controversial issue here that will set off a fierce debate: IQ.

The reproductive technologies of the future will allow parents to have higher IQ children. And you thought the plot of the movie Gattaca was far-fetched! No longer.

I find the world imagined in Gattaca a horrendous free market dystopia. There’s no way I would want that for an Alt Left / Realist Left future.

If the kind of reproductive technologies described in the article above become real, they need to be subject to:

(1) severe government regulation and ethical scrutiny;

(2) provided as a public service available to everybody, just like universal health care, and

(3) the whole world of business and employment subject to rigorous scrutiny to see that the use of gene sequencing doesn’t result in grossly unfair and socially destructive hiring practices and other unethical behvaiour.

So I think that a Social Democratic society subject to the proper policies can manage this challenge.

No massive changes to the human genome, or extreme genetic engineering should be allowed, because I can just imagine current regressive leftism, cultural leftism and transhumanist cultists would produce all sorts of insane plans to genetically change human beings.

Finally, we come to a paradoxical outcome of all this. Read what I say below in its proper context.

The issue of race and average IQ is extremely controversial and I have given my opinion here. I am afraid this has become topical again, because the Alt Right is constantly raising this issue.

I still defend what I have written in my post, especially with respect to the Third World, because I think the case for a largely environmental explanation of the various average IQ gaps is still defensible. My views on this issue are based on the work of the democratic socialist Jim Flynn (see Flynn 2008; 2009a; 2009b; 2010; 2012a; 2012b; 2013; 2016), after whom the Flynn effect is named. I think there are reasons to think that, with proper economic and social development in the Third World, an intergenerational Flynn effect will raise the average IQ of people in Third World nations towards that of the developed world.

But let us – for the sake of argument, and I stress “for the sake of argument” – grant the Alt Right race realists their theory: that there is a significant gap in the average IQ of certain racial groups owing to Darwinian evolution and genetics.

What is the Alt Left answer to this? Even if true, the solution to it does not lie in policies proposed by the Alt Right.

The solution is providing the kind of regulated reproductive technologies described above to all people, and, above all, to people at risk of having children disadvantaged by the accident of genetics, so that average IQ gaps between groups can be eliminated over time.

This does not mean that our societies will be engaged in some kind of endless, mad genetic engineering to create “superhumans” or any such thing. Rather, it would be a Social Democratic society that allows parents to have children who are not disadvantaged by genetic diseases, serious predisposition to diseases or mental disorders, handicaps, or lower than average IQ, in a system where all such reproductive technologies are intensely regulated and subject to severe ethical and social scrutiny.

So essentially: it’s game over for Alt Right race realists. Checkmate.

You are done. Your endless obsession over race and average IQ has a final, definitive answer.

In the long run, any such serious group differences, or individual differences, in IQ, in either developed nations or the Third World, can be fixed by universal health care systems that include free access to severely regulated reproductive technologies to fix this problem.

This is the answer that should be given to all Alt Right race realists.

Having engaged in this hypothetical, I hasten to say: I still defend the environmental position on group IQ gaps, and I still think it is a bad mistake for the Alt Left to get bogged down in debates with the Alt Right over race. But, as we can see, there is a perfectly good refutation of the Alt Right on race realism, even if – for the sake of argument – we grant that the latter were true.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Flynn, James R. 2008. Where Have All the Liberals Gone?: Race, Class, and Ideals in America. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York.

Agreed. Race and genetic explanations for IQ is a race to the bottom in terms of an intellectual debate. Now, I tend to take a socio-economic, environmental and cultural explanation for this question as well. Africa, South Asia, etc. tend to be that way because of poverty, nutrition and education systems. Differences in America tend to be because of socio-economics and culture. Cultural among Jews, Asians and Nigerian immigrants, in addition to their higher-than-average income, explain why they do better in school. Differences in socio-economics and cultural explain why Scots-Irish "Hillbilly" are further down on average.

Of course we can talk about how economics affects culture, how discrimination/racism affects economics, etc. to describe for example Black Americans. But in my view these views are ones most grounded by the evidence we have, and are not subject to the crazy biological determinisms that you will find in the Alt Right.

As they say in the vernacular, LK, you're on fire lately. Another great piece on an issue the left all too often refuses to engage with outside of dismissing the ideas out of hand because they're racist.

Kain, I'm not sure if you give any credence to anything Thomas Sowell writes, but he had observed in "Black Rednecks and White Liberals" that 'authentic' black culture in the US descends from southern white redneck culture, which itself descends from the Scots-Irish "Hillbilly" group you refer to. While Sowell's considered loony to many on the left, you may find his writings on the origins of 'authentic' black culture in said book agreeable. Sowell claims that the educational statistics for free blacks who were educated in New England were on par with whites of similar educational backgrounds, and superior to southern whites whose culture was closer to the Scots-Irish Hillbilly demographic.

Doesn't the success of Nigerian immigrants call into question whether a biological gap is a reasonable explanation for lower IQs among black West African populations? My understanding of genetics is rather vulgar, but if it was primarily biological rather than an interplay of cultural and socio-economic factors, wouldn't one expect the descendants of slaves in the US to outperform Nigerian immigrants, since the slaves are more likely to have a recent ancestor who is completely European?

Egads! You mean eugenics isn't just a racist 19th century pseudoscience after all? Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, Franz Boas and the gang were actually lying? I wonder what else they lied about!

Sean Last recently wrote an article on the Flynn effect which you may be interested in; http://thealternativehypothesis.org/index.php/2016/09/10/the-flynn-effect-race-and-iq/

More seriously though, no matter how much you regulate the eugenic technology in the West, many nations (lead by China) will adopt hard eugenic policies with these technologies and you can't stop them from doing so. They will boost their intelligence well above the other races of the world as Richard Lynn predicted (why not 150 IQ? 200?) and that will be "game over" for the West.

Your plan to equalise racial differences in intelligence will not solve the fundamental problems with diversity. A society composed of 50% Northern Europeans and 50% of East Asians would be less successful than a nation that was 100% Northern European and 100% East Asian ceteris paribus because ethnic diversity is a general weakness and it would also destroy distinct ethno-cultural identities. You may be able to genetically engineer tribalism out of the population and I'm sure many leftists would want to do that but how's relatively un-tribal Sweden doing? What about Germany? If your "plan" is to be truly leftist and egalitarian, you must force Jews and East Asians to undergo dysgenics or boost every group to the current 110-115 Ashkenazi average. East Asians may claim that they are disadvantaged as a race if IQ's are equalised because of their lower average physical attractiveness. Are we to equalise that and all other genetic traits too?

It isn't in the interests of White people to genetically engineer other races to be equally or more intelligent than them in our own nations. We have this problem already in the form of a political-cultural elite of highly intelligent and ethnocentric Ashkenazi's attacking European Gentile interests at every turn. The Alt-Right want to compete on the world state with the Chinese and regard other groups as competitors on an overcrowded planet. Your ideas would leave Europeans defenseless externally and internally from other groups.

A rationally self-interested policy would involve restricting eugenic improvements to your own tribe and making sure other nations don't gain a genetic advantage over you which they could turn into a serious geopolitical advantage.

" If your "plan" is to be truly leftist and egalitarian, you must force Jews and East Asians to undergo dysgenics "

Oh, bullsh*t. That doesn't follow from anything I have said.

This is your own desperate straw man invention because deep down you no doubt see that your own Alt Right obsession with race differences in IQ would have a fairly obvious solution in the sorts of reproductive technologies that may exist by the mid-21st century.

If they are careful about it, the Chinese could use eugenics to give them a decisive genetic advantage. Just sterilising violent criminals or providing graduated tax credits for eugenic couples combined with a variety of other unsophisticated eugenic policies could have that kind of effect over the long-term, especially since the West is engaging in dysgenics at the moment. A large welfare state and indiscriminate immigration isn't good for the national IQ level.

Eliminating tribalism is just one example of the kind of utopian anti-White nonsense that leftists would tend to favour, similar to the idea that we should use the technology Europeans invented to give Somalis, Mexicans, and every other ethnic group genetic affirmative action and make them equally intelligent to us. That only puts Europeans at a relative disadvantage compared to other groups. Why the hell would the Alt-Right support this kind of insane egalitarian altruism?

No, what I would allow as humane social democratic policy, provided such technology is safe, would be mild and probably even conservative compared to the transhumanist cultists and regressive leftists, if they got into this stuff.

Yes, "mild" compared to the extreme left. All of the transhumanist leftists I have talked to say that they want to eliminate races and the European race in particular. It's not hard to be moderate compared to them. Genetic affirmative action is not in the interests of Europeans.

You're not thinking tribally. I want my group to be *smarter* than the others, not just as smart. I'm sure the Chinese agree with me and I'm also sure that tribalism beats universalism in the struggle between groups. Excessive universalism, egalitarianism and ethno-masochism is exactly why the West is committing suicide right now.

If races or ethnic groups have substantially different innate aptitudes (say, Australian Aborigines and Ashkenazi Jews) they will create very different levels of civilisation and culture. Culture is influenced by genetics to an enormous degree and the races are not genetically identical in their innate abilities or anything close to it. Therefore, culture and race are heavily linked.

Interestingly the far-right "IQ based inequality justification" is somewhat self-defeating. Since the people with the highest IQ (people like Einstein or B. Russell e.g.) are generally opposed to it they would not allow extreme inequalities (let alone "race" based ones) were they granted full-power as all "Ubermensch" BS suggest.I suspect it is one of the "reasons" why genuine fascists do base their superiority claims on rather fuzzy notions as "instincts" or "soul".

And BTW what good is to be expected from "tribalism" when so many nations have nukes ?

"War does not determine who is right... only who is left." (B. Russell)